Multi-tenancy

Multi-tenancy lets distinct consumers share a software service or computing infrastructure while retaining separate data and permitted operations. A tenant is the consumer or administrative grouping treated as one isolated customer. Resource pooling commonly assigns shared physical resources dynamically among tenants.^[ref]

For example, two laboratories can use one hosted database application. Each laboratory's users must access only their permitted records, even when both laboratories' records occupy the same database relation. Checks on each database query and limits on resource use serve different purposes: data isolation does not prevent one tenant's expensive work from delaying another. Separate virtual machines are one possible implementation boundary, rather than a requirement of multi-tenancy.